Customize K2 Theme: Downloading, Installing, and Preferences

This was first published on Open Source Maven on October 6, 2007.

For my WordPress blog, simply His, I decided to build upon the theme K2. The version I just download and installed is the Release Candidate 2. This is the latest as of October 5, 2007. You should always check their site [ getk2.com ] to make sure you get the latest version.

1. Go to http://getk2.com/download/
2. Click on first download link displayed on this page. [ Download? ]
3. Unzip the .zip file. [ Zip? ]
4. FTP the contents of the zip file (everything including the main folder) to your blog’s theme directory. [ FTP? ]
   * Your blog’s theme directory should be located in /domainname.com/wp-content/themes/
5. In WordPress Admin, select Presentation -> Themes.
6. You should see the name “K2.0 Release Candidate 2″ and a thumbnail picture. Click on the picture or the text to select the theme.
7. Under Presentation -> Themes, you will see additional choices once K2.0 has been selected. Click on K2 Options.
   1. Advanced Navigation — This adds some nifty navigation to make your blog faster and easier to navigate.
   2. Archives Page — This lets readers access archived posts easier.
   3. Live Commenting — Makes it easier for people to comment without having to reload the page.
   4. Sidebar Management — By now you’ve probably heard of widgets. K2 has a Sidebar Manager that comes with the theme or you can choose to use WordPress’ Widget manager. I chose WordPress’ Widgets here because I’m most familiar with how they work.
   5. Columns — This is so cool! You can instantly change from a Single Column (which puts the sidebars below the main column) to Two Columns to Three Columns. The only drawback I see here is the Three Columns choice puts the main content (bigger) column in the middle. There is not an easy way to move it — say to have a main content column on the left and two smaller columns on the right. Easy is relative in that you *can* do this, but it will take some editing of some php files to set it up.
   6. Asides — Here you can choose to select a category as asides or not to use this at all. I have chosen No Asides right now.
   7. Style — Choosing No Style here simply takes all of the K2 design defaults. If you wanted to, you can create your own style sheet, ftp it into the Styles folder inside the K2 theme folder and choose it here. This style sheet would be loaded after the other style sheets so you could override or change things that you didn’t like in the default style. There are 2 sample style sheets here if you care to look at them.
   8. Header — Here you can upload an image for your header. Since I have chosen the 2 column layout, it tells me the default header size is 780×200px. If I try to upload an image larger than that, then it will ask me to crop it. You can also easily setup a randomized header image here. You can either upload one image at a time through this section or you can FTP images into a special folder. The special folder is found in /wp-content/themes/K2 Release Candidate 2/images/headers/. You can also rename the default Blog tab — for example if you wanted to call it Home.
8. Click the Update Options button when you are finished.